No More Ink Stained Fingers: Read the Newspaper on Facebook

Facebook has partnered up with a plethora of businesses, and now there are a lot more things you can do without ever having to leave Facebook. Within Facebook you will be able to watch TV (Hulu), watch movies (Netflix), listen to music (Spotify), shop (PayPal), read (Wall Street Journal), and play games, just to name a few. Why would you ever need to navigate away from Facebook again? And, as users spend more time on Facebook, they have less time for other social networking sites and even other sites in general. Therefore, if you are a brand, why not bring your content where the people already are?

Many businesses are doing just that. This trend and the open graph concept will undoubtedly change the way people interact with various genres, but specifically how it will affect the way people read news.

“Sometimes you don’t want to wait for a pattern to develop, you just want to see news as it breaks, and about a dozen developers have joined forces with Facebook to provide apps that help people read news.” – Mark Zuckerberg, f8

Newspapers? You mean.. news feed? 48% of US young adults currently get their news through Facebook. Previously, you could see what your friends were reading (if they had shared it on Facebook) but now you can also join in. Apps from publishers such as The Washington Post, Yahoo News, The Guardian, Gizmodo, and several others have already been announced. The apps will tie in with the new timeline user interface as well as the new ticker sidebar to let users read news stories within Facebook and easily share their reading histories. People will have the ability to connect to each other and have real-time conversation about real-time news, as well as influence each other to check out certain content. Digesting the news through Facebook will be both more interesting and engaging due to the addition of the social factor.

The Wall Street Journal's Facebook App

As Facebook continues to evolve and engulf new mediums such as the news industry, is it likely that we may one day never leave the self-contained universe of Facebook?

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